A peer-to-peer network is a type of network in which each workstation has substantially equivalent capabilities and responsibilities. This differs from client/server architectures, in which some computers are dedicated to serving the others. A peer-to-peer session consists of two or more of users or applications connected to one-another over a network. A peer-to-peer session can be established in a number of conventional ways including, for example, by hardwiring specific communication details (e.g., network addresses and protocols) into clients and/or adding complex specialized lobby support code into a client to obtain necessary communication implementation details from a proprietary third party server. Thus, direct peer-to-peer session establishment generally requires each session client to be specifically designed to communicate with the other session client(s) based on each respective client's specific communication implementation details.
Such rigid design requirements typically result in applications that are not very robust or easily ported across platforms or implementations. For instance, hardwiring a particular network address into an application is not a very robust technique to communicate with another device since the network address used to access the device may change if the device is moved to a domain using a Network Address Translators (NATs) that multiplexes a single IP address across multiple machines.
To avoid hardwiring communication specifics such as network addresses and protocols into applications, conventional peer-to-peer session arrangement techniques allow a client to arrange a peer-to-peer session with another client using “lobby support”. Lobby support's primary purpose is to enable users to meet and exchange network connection information to establish peer-to-peer sessions. Unfortunately, enabling application lobby support is substantially burdensome for application developers that desire to use lobby support to arrange peer-to-peer sessions because a considerable amount of dedicated lobby support code (e.g., the DirectPlay®, ActiveX® libraries, and/or the like) must be implemented in each application. Such implementation requirements are time consuming and typically result in an undesirable increase in code size and code complexity.
Moreover, lobby support implementations are substantially burdensome because application developers or a third party are/is also required to implement a lobby support infrastructure. The lobby support infrastructure includes a non-generic lobby server to interface with specialized lobby support client code to communicate device communication specifics. Additionally, another specialized client based piece code must be developed, loaded, and installed on each client device to communicate with the lobby server—using whatever protocols are appropriate. Each of these respective tasks is substantially daunting in itself.
Accordingly, conventional techniques to arrange peer-to-peer sessions are considerably problematic in that they either involve rigid design requirements that hardwire communication specifics into application code, or require considerable specialized lobby support code in an application along with 3rd party development efforts to generate a server communication infrastructure.
These and other limitations of traditional systems and procedures to establish peer-to-peer communication sessions between various applications are addressed by the following described arrangements and procedures.